And Stay Out

Louie Mantia, in his post reacting to the upcoming departure of Alan Dye:

There’s no doubt Jony has good taste, by the way. He and his team designed great products during the first half of his tenure at Apple. But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. […]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.

I sometimes think about what we lost along the way as Apple chased ultra-simplicity and luxury. Jony Ive spent a decade slowly removing any trace of personality from every product Apple released¹ . Apple went from the original translucent-colored plastic aesthetic of the “Bondi blue” iMac G3 and the Power Mac G3 “Blue & White” to the more refined and unique design of the iMac G4 to… a bunch of aluminum rounded rectangles for decades. Chasing thinness, removing ports, simplifying everything down to metal and glass with no differentiation.

I have an iMac G4 sitting on my garage workbench, and simply moving the display around is a source of delight. On a shelf nearby, a beaten up graphite “Clamshell” iBook G3 makes me smile every time I open it. Booting up Mac OS 9 and clicking around, listening to the old hard drive chug… is this simply nostalgia? Perhaps. But there is undoubtedly so much personality in the design of these products.

There’s no doubt current Apple hardware is built with unparalleled precision. Their glass is able to survive devastating falls. The speed of their custom chip architecture blow the competition away, the beauty and density of their displays makes looking at a regular 1x LCD hilarious. But it’s all formulations of the same materials, in slightly different shapes, all serving the same purpose. Apple has more operating systems today than ever, but most are variations on the same core version of iOS. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, but there’s a feeling of same-ness that permeates everything Apple makes today.

Walking into the SoHo NYC Apple Store around 2004 was like entering a playground. I would stand in a crowd of like-minded enthusiasts and watch Jobs’ MacWorld keynotes on the large projector in the rear of the store. We’d wait in lines for hours to get the latest model of the then-new iPhone. Software came in boxes, headphones had cables, and everything oozed with Apple’s unique design aesthetic. It truly felt like a golden age as every year macOS gained new, exciting (and playful!) features like Exposé, fast-user switching, Spotlight, Safari, and more.

Today, Apple Stores are highly controlled, extremely polished metal, oak and glass clean-rooms with row after row of rectangular objects and very little playfulness. Employees ask you which device you need and then guide you to add one or more white accessories. Every year we get a few colors—pastels in non-Pro devices, muted colors in Pro devices—and maybe one unique product version with a singular variation. This past year that was the iPhone Air. A while back it was the iPhone X. In between were several years of rectangles in various minor color options.

The outlier of recent note is Vision Pro. Ignoring the downsides (isolation, weight, enormous cost), Vision Pro is something truly new from Apple and is remarkably playful. visionOS, which Dye oversaw in some capacity (and certainly takes credit for), is different and spectacular. Depth, shadows, highlights—they all play not just a visual part but an important building block of the spatial computing experience. Vision Pro is a limited platform for many reasons, but it is certainly new and exciting and a dramatically different user experience both physically and digitally.

I keep hoping next year will be one in which we truly see something new or unique from Apple on the Mac, iPhone and iPad fronts. Alas, 2025 wasn’t that year. Maybe 2026? Perhaps the inevitable eventual folding iPhone will be the first new industrial design in a decade to delight and amaze.

Louie continues:

Neither Jony nor Alan should ever have been in charge of UI design or product design. Elevating Jony was a bad decision on Tim Cook’s part. And it’s unfortunate that resulted in Jony putting Alan into this position to begin with, because it only lengthened this period of time where bad taste and poor sensibility in software prevailed. There was no reason to believe Jony would be good at this, and there was never any evidence Alan would be good at this either. I’ve never found any examples of Alan’s professional work prior to having this job.

I hold the opinion iOS 7 was deeply destructive to the field of user interface design. Arguments can be made that “rich corinthian leather” was getting out of hand across Apple’s operating systems, but at least users understood the affordances—buttons looked like buttons. Suddenly that was stripped away and replaced with blank white screens on which all UI elements were simply Helvetica Neue text in either black or one additional tint color. Is that a string or a button? You wouldn’t know unless you tapped to find out.

The Ive-narrated iOS 7 reveal video² spoke of “foundational” changes to “layers and hierarchy”, but in practice iOS 7 didn’t differ much from iOS 6, other than its garish colors, transparency which made text hard to read (déjà vu, eh?), and an abysmal icon grid that left us with ugly system icons lacking in all personality and depth. Over the course of only a few months, my iPhone at the time went from having countless bespoke, beautiful user interfaces to a sea of white screens filled with 1pt-stroke icons and plain black text. It was a depressing loss.

Where Apple goes, the industry follows, which meant “flat design” and plain text on white screens was suddenly en vogue across all mediums. Apple turned the design industry on its head all because Jony Ive thought the only true way to design something was to strip away all “clutter and ornamentation”. But why was Ive in charge of user interface design at all? One can’t simply repeat “design is how it works” into a mirror 5 times a day and become a UI design expert. Ive’s obsessions with high-end fashion and “simplicity” decimated the feel of Apple products. He reduced everything Braun-inspired precision blueprints and celebrated the death of “clutter”.

It took 10 years for iOS to recover from iOS 7’s design overhaul. Slowly, gradients returned in a few places. Shadows, depth and, in spots here and there, playfulness. And so it was perfectly timed for Liquid Glass to land and create a whole new suite of problems we had finally solved. Ironically, I think there’s a fair amount of playfulness in Liquid Glass—at least conceptually—but the implementation is sloppy and full of UX transgressions we as an industry are far too experienced to accept. In the year of our lord 2025, no trillion-dollar company should be lauding a new user interface which places white text on a transparent floating bar that creates chromatic aberration and flickers continuously while scrolling. What does this provide to the user? It looked great in a sizzle reel, but in real use it’s all show, no substance.

Where will Apple take its user interfaces in the wake of Dye’s departure? I’m not sure, but I have hopes. Liquid Glass was a major selling point of OSes 26, and Tim Cook isn’t the type of leader to walk back major decisions, so it’s not going away. But my assumption is with new design leadership the user interface design team will work to slowly refine Glass and improve the user experience and accessibility issues—immediately adding a clear or tinted option was an obvious admission of these problems and quick attempt to improve them somewhat.

It took a decade for iOS 7’s damage to be mitigated. I hope we’re not in for another decade of repair to fix Liquid Glass. And more importantly, I hope Apple learns their lesson with Dye and only invests in specialists with the skill and experience necessary to truly lead their interfaces into the future.